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So, I’ve been playing Skyrim for about 9 days now, and I would like to share some of my thoughts and observations. I’ve only played Morrowind and Oblivion in The Elder Scrolls series, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours in each, not to mention the hundreds of hours I’ve spent in Bethesda’s other huge, open world first-person RPG games: Fallout 3 and New Vegas. (Though it should be mentioned that New Vegas was only published by Bethesda, it was developed by Obsidian, which explains the glitchiness.) This game is huge, and I can’t cover everything I’ve noticed/want to blather about in one post, so I’ll do it in installments until I get bored or enough people beg me to stop.

Installment One: Magic (or magicka, which is, like, totally different): I’ve started playing as a mage in these games since Oblivion, when they made playing as a straight mage actually viable. In Morrowind, your spells would misfire at early levels, requiring you to grind first just to be able to level your skill enough so that when you cast something, it actually fucking cast.

For instance, you may start Morrowind with the intention of being a wizardly badass and making all of your primary skills magic ones. “I’ll summon tanks with conjuration, turn invisible with illusion, and then melt faces with destruction. I’m gonna fucking own this game,” you naively think to yourself. You then get dropped into the game world with one crappy fireball spell, encounter one rat, rapidly mash the fire key, miss 29 times out of 30, and get your ankles chewed off until you die. At this point, you delete Wizard Von Magickaballs, reroll an Orc with skills in heavy armor and blunt that you’ve subtly named “Hatefuck Genitalcrusher” and never, ever try magic in that game again.

In Oblivion, you never misfired, though the problem with magic in Oblivion was that higher-level spells required both huge amounts of magicka and a skill number of 25, 50, 75, or 100 for apprentice, adept, expert, and master level magic, respectively. This actually made sense, but it meant that you would have to grind out your skills so that you wouldn’t have to keep summoning that same shitty skeleton all the time. Once you finally did become an adept or whatever, you would often find that that spell that you’ve been drooling over for the seven hours or so between the time that you bought it and the chance you have to actually use it uses up all of your magicka and is completely underwhelming. You might venture into a cave full of trolls with your high-ish level fireball expecting to one-hit them, but instead find yourself out of magicka and facing down down an angry, slightly singed troll with nothing more than some chainmail and a dagger.

Skyrim represents a slight paradigm shift in TES magic. No longer is it required that you be at a certain skill level to cast spells. A character with 15 in Destruction can cast a master level Destruction spell, if they have enough magicka to do so.

Though the schools of Destruction, Illusion, Conjuration, Restoration, and Alteration are still present, Mysticism has been axed. Good fucking riddance. The spells that fell under Mysticism are still there, but the school is gone, allowing you to focus on schools that actually matter.

The big combat improvement in Skyrim, dual wielding, thankfully applies to magic as well. Each of the magic schools allows you to spend a skill point on a Perk (I’ll talk about Perks in another installment) that allows you to overcharge your spells by putting the same spell in both hands. Your character then performs a sort of Kamehameha animation and shoots a single spell out of both hands that, depending on the school, is more powerful or lasts longer. Unfortunately, other than the change in the casting animation, the spell looks the same whether overcharged or not, which is disappointing, but other than that it’s a fantastic improvement. A further perk in the Destruction school makes it so that when you hit an enemy with an overcharged spell, they stagger, which means you can interrupt just about any attack with this method. It works on everything, too, even giants and dragons. A well-timed fireball has saved me numerous times from certain death from the breath of a dragon or the swing of a giant’s club.

Destruction, which is the meat and potatoes school of any mage, still has only fire, frost, and shock spells, though they all have secondary effects now. Targets on fire take more damage, frost saps stamina, and shock saps magicka. There are at least 3 completely different forms and animations for fire, frost, and shock spells, like shooting fire out of your hands like a flamethrower, or a chain lightning spell that arcs to nearby enemies.

Conjuration has seen some great improvements as well. Instead of having a huge roster of undead creatures to conjure, like the aforementioned shitty skeleton or weak-ass zombie, you can now resurrect any dead enemy or animal to help you out for as 60 seconds or so. There are different level spells for different level enemies.

Por ejemplo, the spell Raise Zombie only works on low level enemies like bandits, wolves, etc, but won’t work on, say, a flame atronach. Once you have the right spell, though, that badass wizard that you just wasted can become your new best friend for 60 seconds.

The best part about this is that you can summon anything. Zombie elks? You got it. Undead chickens? Fuck yes. Wanna be a dick and kill and then resurrect a farmer’s wife and then send her into battle against her husband? The possibilities are endless. Once the spell runs out or the zombie has been killed in battle, they disintegrate so you can’t keep just resurrecting them ad nauseum, but their equipment can still be looted from the ash. I’ve found that its better to wait until you’ve used them to loot them, as an armored bandit with a mace is more effective than a naked bandit employing fisticuffs, though definitely not as funny. You can still summon atronachs and dremoras, though it should be noted that you can no longer soul trap them for infinite souls.

The major problem with Conjuration is the pathfinding, which is actually a major problem with Skyrim overall. For some reason, resurrected zombie-folk have the pathfinding of a roomba, while regular conjured folk and companions have the pathfinding of, say, one of those expensive soccer playing robots that they develop at MIT. This problem is further exacerbated by the relatively lengthy resurrection animation that zombies must undergo before they can actually be of use. By the time the damn things are resurrected, either you or your enemies are already dead.

I only use Resto to heal, and don't really use Alteration or Illusion yet, that will be for another playthrough.

5. Demon’s Souls: Released in 2009 for the PlayStation 3, Demon’s Souls is a third person hack and slash role playing game of the sword and sorcery style. While the creepy atmosphere and ugly creatures make the game a bit unsettling, its not the graphics or sound that make Demon’s Souls scary; it’s the difficulty.

Demon’s Souls’ notoriously brutal difficulty transforms every combat encounter into a jaw-clenching, palm-sweating experience that leaves the player’s pulse pounding and nerves raw. Players gain strength by killing demon’s to release their souls, which they then invest into stats like health, stamina, etc. The catch is that if the player dies, all souls are lost. Unlike most games in which death is little more than a brief impedance that send the player back to a checkpoint, Demon’s Souls sends you back to the beginning of a level with weakened armor and a depleted stock of health items, with nothing to show for the effort.

Scary Moment: Every boss battle is a harrowing trial of nerves and skill. The fear comes not from the bosses themselves, but for the time invested into getting to the boss. Bosses are only found at the end of the levels, and by the time the boss is reached, a player will have several levels worth of souls. To be killed by a boss is to lose all of the time it took to get there, plus the levels of souls already attained, making every encounter an exercise in fear control.

4. Bioshock: Bioshock is a first person shooter with RPG elements released in 2007 for Xbox 360 and PC and in 2008 for PlayStation 3. The cerebral storyline is told primarily through the art direction in the dystopian undersea city of Rapture. Rapture’s tortured past is brought to light when protagonist Jack stumbles upon a bathysphere that takes him to the ravaged city where he must battle the deformed inhabitants in order to escape. Bioshock is both dark and colorful, and the undersea setting really helps to establish a quiet, unsettling mood.

Scary Moment: Very early in the game, Jack happens upon a hideously deformed woman babbling a disturbing lullaby into a baby carriage. The woman turns and attacks Jack, leaving him no choice but to kill her. When Jack looks into the carriage, he sees that the insane woman was actually singing to a revolver.

3. Resident Evil 2: While the first Resident Evil spawned the sequel, the sequel spawned the franchise that is still popular today in games and movies. RE 2 was released in 1998 for the PlayStation, and became the defining title for survival horror games of the time. RE 2 featured the series’ staples of limited ammo and health items, weird, unnecessary puzzles, and lots and lots of zombies.

Scary Moment: Survival horror games of the PlayStation era employed the “creature jumps out from nowhere at you” event to great effect. Possibly the most memorable instance of this occurs in Resident Evil 2 when protagonist Leon Kennedy walks past a window in a quiet room and a Licker jumps through it at him. The Licker is one of RE 2’s most difficult and terrifying enemies. With it’s fast, jittery animation, exposed brain, huge claws, and long deadly tongue, the Licker is capable of killing a player in seconds, and any encounter with one, especially an unexpected one, is a terror inducing event.

2. Dead Space: Dead Space is a third person survival horror shooter released in 2008 for consoles and PC. Its sci-fi story unfolds aboard a mining spacecraft a la Alien, and it follows mining engineer Isaac Clarke as he battles an infestation of Necromorphs, human corpses that have been transformed into terrifying, The Thing-like creatures by a strange alien virus.

Dead Space is unique among many horror games in that it is a competent shooter at heart. Unlike the slow tank controls that are employed by games like Resident Evil, Dead Space controls much more like Gears of War, except the slow pacing is much more appropriate for the scary atmosphere. Despite the heightened controls, the player will guide Isaac to death after gory death because of the relentless, hard-to-kill nature of the unpredictable Necromorphs.

Isaac has his mining tools at his disposal instead of traditional sci-fi weapons. This is fortunate, because the cutting tools are far more effective at dismembering the undead creatures than, say, a plasma rifle might be. In fact, cutting off two or more limbs is the only way to incapacitate the crawling horrors, as a headshot will most likely just make them angry.

Scary Moment: After getting the hang of shooting the limbs off of the implacable Necromorphs, the player is lulled into a sense of false confidence. That is, until Isaac faces the Hunter. The Hunter regenerates lost limbs in seconds, meaning that all Isaac can do is delay the unstoppable creature temporarily as it stalks him throughout the ship. The Hunter turns the player’s confidence into a sense of complete helplessness and sheer terror.

1. Silent Hill: Playing the original Silent Hill for the first time is the creepiest experience that I have ever had. The psychological effects of nail-biting apprehension, battle induced adrenaline, and abject terror that this game was able to invoke in me was only bearable for around an hour or so, after which I would have to turn it off and do something else to calm down.

Silent Hill is a third person survival horror game that was released in 1999 for the original PlayStation. The style is in the vein of its main rival, Resident Evil, and focuses on protagonist Harry Mason as he searches for his missing daughter in the eponymous town. Harry must face the abominations that inhabit the alternate dimension of Silent Hill, the Otherworld, in his quest to find his daughter.

Looking back, all of the features that made Silent Hill scary were mere programming tricks that served to mitigate the hardware limitations of the first PlayStation. Ubiquitous fog, darkness, and low textures produced a claustrophobic, gritty, dirty feel to the game. The intentionally poor controls actually enhanced the fear-factor because it made combat that much more challenging and the enemies more deadly. In house Konami developers Team Silent crafted a moment-to-moment experience whose overall effect belied its limitations.

Scary Moment: Within the first ten minutes of the game, Harry Mason finds himself trapped in a blood-slick, dark, chain link fence maze with only a butane lighter as a source of illumination. He is then set upon and ostensibly killed by a swarm of small, gory, skinless, knife-wielding baby mutants.

Gears of War 3, released last September for Xbox 360 and PC, concludes the Gears trilogy in thrilling, if predictable fashion. GOW 3 continues the series’ signature pitch-perfect cover-based shooter mechanics, while introducing new characters, modes, and weapons.

GOW 3 picks up two years after the conclusion of Gears of War 2; with the flooding of the Locust’s underground home and the sinking of Jacinto, humanity’s last stronghold. The Coalition of Ordered Governments, humanity’s final remnant of a structured government on Sera, has been disbanded. Compounding all of this is the rise of a terrifying new enemy; the Lambent.

The Lambent, an explosive, emulsion infused form of the Locust, were introduced at the end of Gears Of War2. Developer Epic does a good job of expositing all of this new plot development in mercifully short cut-scenes and in-game dialogue. After all, no one buys a Gears game just to find catch up on Delta Squad’s current happenings on Sera.

The gameplay will be familiar to anyone who has previously played the Gears series. The action reload, the roadie run, cover based shooting, and the crimson omen all return in GOW3 in near-perfect action game harmony. Epic clearly did not feel the need to fix what was not broken, and while it is perhaps getting a little stale over three full games, the gameplay still represents the best combination of mechanics that third person shooting games have to offer.

Offsetting the repetitiveness somewhat are the new weapons and enemies, though the new enemies sometimes feel like re-skinned Locust rather than being an entirely new set of antagonists. The Lambent, while appearing radically different with a sort of nuclear yellow visage, behave much like their Locust analogues. Lambent rank and file includes rifle-toting foot soldiers (Locust Grunts), huge, hard to kill, explosive lobbing Gunkers (Locust Boomers), and small, numerous, explosive melee creatures called Polyps (Locust Tickers). Though the graphical difference is appreciated, I feel that Epic could have done more to differentiate the Lambent in form or behavior.

The main difference between Lambent and Locust is that the Lambent tend to explode when dispatched. Unfortunately, this does not add much more than a visual treat, as the consequence of being caught in a Lambent explosion at close range is merely a slight ding to your health.

The new weapons do far more to differentiate GOW3 from the previous two. For instance, the retro lancer is a primitive, more powerful version of the series’ signature weapon, and it features a bayonet rather than a chainsaw. The retro lancer is best fired in short bursts due to its ridiculous recoil which complements its incredible power. Trying to melee with the bayonet is similarly inaccurate, as the animation sends you into an attack run that must be lined up perfectly in order to connect.

Also new is the one-shot, a devastating sniper rifle that lives up to its name by enabling its user to eliminate nearly any target in the game with only one shot, and the digger, an explosive weapon that burrows under barriers to find its mark. These new weapons and others alter the dynamic of single and multi-player enough to justify this sequel.

New multiplayer modes are another welcome addition. Horde mode has been augmented with new tower defense elements, and a sort of opposite of Horde mode is introduced; Beast mode. Beast mode sees you and your comrades raiding a human encampment with Locust units such as the Ticker, Wretch, Grunt, Boomer, or even Corpser over 12 levels of increasing difficulty. The more units you buy, the more you unlock, enabling you, at the highest level, to experience the rewarding catharsis of eviscerating Marcus Fenix and crew with a Berserker, rather than playing as Marcus Fenix on the receiving end of a Berserker beat-down. Frustratingly, Beast Mode features a too-short time limit and long between-unit load times which serve to limit the fun that could be had if the time limit were increased just a bit.

Another irksome element of GOW3 as a whole is the main game’s inability to answer basic questions about the world of Sera. What year is it in Earth time? When did humans travel to Sera in the first place? What, exactly, are the Locust and where did they come from? Did they evolve naturally on Sera or are they migrants too? Why is it that the hideous, crag-faced, polymorphic Locust have a human chick in a red leather Dominatrix outfit for a leader? It’s as if the developers deliberately left these questions unanswered so that we would be forced to buy the GOW novels to find anything out about its universe. To be fair, there are random tchotchkes scattered about the game that do provide a bit of backstory, though these are so out of the way that you might as well just consult a Wiki for their contents.

Despite questionably absent exposition and repetitive gameplay elements, GOW3 is a great game. New enemies, weapons and game modes spice up the already stellar single and multiplayer features. The multiplayer aspect alone will have you exploring every weapon and map for tactical advantages far after you’ve beaten the single player campaign alone or with friends. If you have the ability to play online, you should consider buying, but all others should rent it to beat it alone or with couch co-op. I rate Gears Of War 3 a very good 8.5 out of 10.

Total number of games in collection: 5

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Comments (1)

from article on the Skyrim patch

You seemed so concered about me so I've copied my reply here in case you miss it on the article. Thanks again.

Wow, so many assumptions. Thanks for taking such an interest in my bordom.

Lets see...

In order:

No. I only got bored with the last two, well after the main quests, once I'd felt I'd done all that I wanted to do in them.

Yes.

None of the above.

No. I thought it would be a lot like the other two.

From everything I've seen so far, Skyrim looks to be a great game. I just didn't expect to find myself burned-out on the gameplay. I found I was bored, most likely because I've done so much of it before, just in other settings. This sometimes happens with me with game series, and I doubt I'm the only one.

I feel the same about Zelda games. I loved Zelda games, played them to death, them when I bought Twilight Princess I only got maybe ten or so hours into it before I started feeling that been there, done that feeling. Then new story and the new mechanics were great, it's just the rest of the game played so much like the others that I found that I wanted to play something fresh and less familiar and had had my fill of Zelda gameplay.

The same thing happened for me with Madden.

My tastes tend to change from time to time. The games are no less great and I hate when it happens because it's always with game series I've loved.